Old Picture Books, With Other Essays on Bookish Subjects

by Alfred W. Pollard

Some of the shorter remarks seem to apply to a boarding school. 'Dear master, with your permission, I should like to take a bath' says one boy: another asks that he may go and lay the table, a third that he may take the clothes to the washerwoman! A boy whose mother has called for him addresses his petition for leave to the Precentor, and we may guess therefore that these boarding-schools were attached to churches or monasteries, and that the boys, like the monks themselves, had to do much of their own household work.

The boys are given plenty of tips for talk among themselves. 'Why were you late to-day?' asks one, and is reminded that bed is warm and sleep sweeter than honey. One boy sees a priest coming into the school and hopes he will ask for a holiday. His fellow says they have had several holidays lately and doubts if another will be granted. The gloomy side of medieval school-life is not left unrepresented. 'How often have you been punished to-day?' is one of the questions, and as if the alternative answers 'semel—bis—ter—quater,' were not enough, they are crowned with the cruel prophecy 'et iterum cras corrigeris.'

The last paragraph of the book is concerned with the appointment, duties and behaviour of monitors. They are called 'monitors' nowadays because, I suppose, they jog memories as to what is the next day's work, and in other ways prevent crime. In those days they were called 'custodes,' chiefly I am afraid because they kept the rods. 'You've got to appoint monitors, Sir,' says a boy. 'You be monitor, then,' 'Please, Sir, I've only just been monitor, and it's not my turn.' 'Who ought to be appointed then?' 'This is the boy, Sir, both because it's his turn and because he knows how to get you long and nasty rods!' That is one dialogue. Here is another, boy with boy. 'Have you been putting down the boys who made a disturbance and ran as they came out of church?' 'I have.' 'Have you been putting me down?' 'I have; Jones saw you running in the street and gave me your name to be put down.' 'Dear monitor, take my name off, lest I be punished, and I'll ask my mother to give you a big bun (magnum panem).' 'Hold your tongue, then, and I'll take it off'—whereat the boy thanks heaven, and we gather that there was rather a bad tone in the schools in which 'Es tu Scolaris?' was in use. It must also be said that if the boys talked as they were taught, they talked very bad Latin.

The edition from which I have taken these notes has no 'woodcuts.' If it had had one it would probably have been something of the nature of this picture from an English grammar book, in which the master is shown armed with the usual birch. The grammars of those days were in fact so bad that it was held to be impossible for any one to learn them without the additional notes offered by a rod. But for my first illustration (p. 100), I have taken a more human and, I think, a more lifelike picture, from a 'Flores Poetarum' printed at Florence about 1500. No doubt by the time boys came to study poetry they had reached a more mature stage, and were treated better. But these young scholars look boyish and vivacious enough, and I would fain hope that this is a true picture of a Florentine classroom. A Venetian book goes even beyond this, anticipating the methods of the Newest Educators, for in a woodcut to it, while the elder students are shown as solemnly attending to a lecture, two little boys are studying their A B C on the floor, with a small dog to help them. But this picture is so plainly imaginative that I will not even show it.

[ENGLISH BOOKS PRINTED ABROAD][11]

IT may fairly be said that only a writer who knew nothing about them would propose, in a half-hour's paper, to talk about the English books printed abroad, in some forty different places, during the last four centuries. But a consideration of the earlier of these books forms a necessary part of the Society's contribution to the Bibliography of English Literature up to 1640, and the subject, as a whole, has for a long time seemed to me an interesting one; since, either in the state of the printing trade at home, or in the circumstances of the author, or the nature of his subject, in every case a special reason has to be found why the book should have been printed out of England. I have, therefore, light-heartedly endeavoured to map out the broader outlines of the subject, in the hope that I may persuade other members of the Society to give their help in filling in the details, and I must ask you to remember that my paper is put forward only as a means of provoking a discussion much more valuable than anything I can contribute myself.

I have said that the subject we have before us this evening is the English books printed abroad during the last four centuries. It would have been more accurate to say during the last four centuries and a quarter,[12] for the latest book I shall have to mention was printed in Florence in 1895, while Caxton began printing English books at Bruges in 1474 or 1475, and even earlier than these we have a Sarum Breviary printed at Cologne, and assigned by Mr. Gordon Duff to the year 1473. These Sarum Service-books, with which so many foreign printers busied themselves during the next eighty-five years, lie on the outskirts of our subject, as the greater number of them are wholly or mainly in Latin, and we are obliged to limit ourselves at present to English books, and may not take in the very considerable number of Latin works written by Englishmen, and intended mainly for the English market, though printed abroad. It is necessary, indeed, to remember that for some generations after the invention of printing, our country, for many classes of books, was wholly dependent on the enterprise of continental printers, and that, to some extent, this is still the case. A single oration of Cicero and the plays of Terence were the only Latin classics printed in England during the fifteenth century. No Greek book appeared here until 1543, and several of the great Greek classics did not find an English printer until the second half of the seventeenth century. Even now, for the obscurer classics, and for the bulk of Oriental books, we are content to rely on Germany, and in the fifteenth century this reliance on the continental presses extended to every variety of learned book. It would be absurd to attribute this state of things to any lack of enterprise on the part of Caxton and his fellows. Our President has lately shown how carefully, even in Italy, the first printers felt the pulse of their market, and whereas Venice was a great trade centre for the whole of Europe, in England a publisher who produced a book too learned to find purchasers here would have had little chance of appealing to the book lovers of other countries. Thus it may be urged in defence of the Act of Richard III., which permitted books to be imported into England from abroad and freely sold here, that by encouraging English printers to confine themselves to the popular books for which there was a safe market, it saved them from any temptation to risk the fate which Sweynheym and Pannartz had incurred at Rome; at the same time it greatly helped forward the cause of education. Only three foreign printers, Gerard Leeu and Jan van Doesborgh at Antwerp, and Antoine Vérard at Paris, abused the liberty granted to them by competing needlessly with our native printers in books they were capable of printing equally well themselves. The four popular English books printed by Leeu, who had a special fount of type cut for the purpose, were 'The History of Jason,' 'The History of Knight Paris and the Fair Vienne,' 'The Dialogue of Salomon and Marcolphus,' and 'The Chronicles of England.' These were all issued in 1492 and 1493, and all with the exception of the 'Marcolphus,' were reprints of editions issued by Caxton. Even the 'Marcolphus,' according to Mr. Duff, who has edited a facsimile reprint of it for Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen, may possibly have been reprinted from a Caxton now entirely lost, though this, of course, is a mere conjecture.

Of Doesborgh's English books there is no need to speak at length, since all Members of the Society have in their possession Mr. Proctor's exhaustive monograph of this printer's work. As a printer he was very inferior to Leeu, but as a publisher he showed much more enterprise in his choice of books, introducing to English readers the stories of 'Euryalus and Lucretia,' 'Virgilius the Magician,' 'Frederick of Jennen,' 'Mary of Nemmegen,' 'Tyll Howleglas,' and the 'Parson of Kalenborowe,' in addition to the still more notable book 'Of the New Lands.' Of the thirty-two books which Mr. Proctor has been able to assign to Doesborgh's press, no fewer than eighteen were printed for England, comprising grammars, stories, theology, history, geography, a prognostication, a medical book, and two books on the valuation of gold and silver, thus covering nearly the whole range of the popular literature of the day. The earliest of these books appeared before 1508, the latest some time after 1520, and they thus came out at the rate of rather over one a year. They were all, however, of the class of books which rapidly get themselves thumbed out of existence, and from the extreme rarity of those which survive it is probable that Doesborgh's real output was considerably greater. Antoine Vérard, on the other hand, had a trick of printing a few copies of his books on vellum which has greatly helped to preserve them, and it is improbable that, besides his Service-books, he printed any other works for the English market than the two which have come down to us. These are 'The traitte of god lyuyng and good deyng,' and 'The Kalendayr of Shyppars,' both printed in 1503, and both enriched with numerous illustrations, some beautiful, others grotesquely horrible, mostly taken from his 'Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir' of 1492. In his choice of a translator Vérard was unlucky, for he seems to have employed some wild Scotsman, who was no master of his own tongue and still more ignorant of French. When Robert Copland retranslated the Kalendar for Wynkyn de Worde in 1508, he was as scornful of his predecessor's 'corrupte Englysshe' as any one bibliographer could be of the labours of another, though in saying that 'no man coulde understonde (it) perfectly' he certainly did not err on the side of exaggeration, since most southern readers must have found some difficulty in understanding it at all.

To the names of Leeu, Doesborgh, and Vérard, as printers of English popular books, I ought perhaps to add those of Wolfgang Hopyl of Paris, and Martin Morin and James Ravynell of Rouen, each of whom printed before 1500 an edition of the 'Liber Festivalis' or 'Festial,' the book of sermons with which parsons might regale their parishioners on the high-days and holy-days of the Church. The 'Festial' was of a semi-liturgical nature, and the three printers were all printers of liturgies. We have, thus, an easy transition to the English Service-books printed abroad to which we must now return for a few minutes. Of these the immense majority were for the use of Sarum, though the British Museum possesses a Hereford Missal printed at Rouen in 1502, and three York Missals printed at the same place in 1516-17. Of Sarum Service-books printed before 1540, the 'Old English Catalogue' records no less than one hundred and five as in the possession of the Museum in 1884, and the distribution of these is notable. One Missal was printed at Basel, by Michael Wenssler about 1486; another Missal by Hertzog, at Venice in 1494; eleven service-books at Rouen, the earlier ones by Martin Morin, James Ravynell, P. Violette, and Andrew Myllar; twelve at Antwerp, of which one is a 'Directorium' printed by Leeu in 1488, and most of the rest much later books from the press of Christopher of Endhouen; and lastly no less than fifty-six at Paris, the list of their printers comprising many of the best firms of the time. Against these eighty-one foreign editions, of which, it will be observed, sixty-seven are French, the editions printed in England number no more than twenty-four, and many of these are printed with cuts borrowed or copied from France. Obviously this class of work required special qualifications in the printers, and it was easier and cheaper to import the Service-books, even the Primers, than to produce them at home. During the last few years of Henry VIII.'s reign the number of Service-books, which had previously shown some falling off, again increased, and under his daughter Mary there was, of course, a great revival of them. The English printers were now better able to cope with the demand, and of the forty-five Service-books in the Museum printed during these years, twenty-four were printed in London, against ten at Rouen, five at Paris, and six at Antwerp. Of course, the Museum collection, both of these and of the earlier Service-books, is by no means complete, but it is probably representative, and there can be no doubt that during the period when liturgies are most interesting bibliographically, four-fifths of those printed for use in England came to us from abroad.